The Top 10 MailChimp Alternatives for Small Business Email Marketing

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Update 12/17/15: This post has been updated with additional email marketing systems based off of the great suggestions and feedback in the comments. The pre-existing solutions on this list have also been updated so their information is current.

In the world of tissues, Kleenex is indisputably the king. You can use the words “tissue” and “Kleenex” interchangeably, much like the phrases “email marketing” and “MailChimp”. But just because these brands have become the generic trademark of their industries doesn’t mean they necessarily work for you. (Personally, I really like Puffs – it’s so soft and plushy.) After all, like every nose is different, so is every company.

So what’s the Puffs of email marketing?

I’ve compiled this handy list of ten MailChimp alternatives for you. Please note that I have put them in no particular order. What works well for one company, might not work at all for another. For a quick glance, check out the graphic below and for more details, keep reading.

GetResponse is a feature-rich solution, as shown in the comparison graphic, and starting at just $15 a month, it’s actually one of the few solutions on this list that comes in cheaper than MailChimp’s paid version! ($10 cheaper, to be specific.) It’s best suited for small to mid-sized companies, but it’s scalable!

What Makes It Special: GetResponse really does have a TON of features, many of which other vendors don’t even offer. The highlights:

Perhaps the most popular of Mailchimp alternatives, Constant Contact is a great email marketing platform for small businesses. The pricing is fairly flexible, and it’s based on how many contacts you email. Pricing starts at $20/month for up to 500 contacts and goes up from there. It’s discounted to $17 for pre-paying the whole year.

What Makes It Special: Constant Contact not only markets themselves as a solution for small business, they really deliver. They offer many, many ways for small businesses to learn about email marketing and how to use Constant Contact. Their educational resources include live and on-demand webinars, as well as live classes – day-long courses on how to use the software, held in multiple locations across North America. In addition, they work hard to make putting together emails really intuitive. One of the most interesting things they do is break their 400+ templates into industry and function.

Additionally, Constant Contact has figured out some interesting ways to integrate your email and social media campaigns. First, they have an app that allows them to integrate specially with Hootsuite, so you can do all your posting from one place. Secondly, they allow you to send out special emails that link your customers to Facebook. These emails are designed to encourage your customers to share your emails on Facebook. You can then track your success on social media right in Constant Contact.

Perhaps even better, Emma’s reporting features are pretty stellar. Emma not only has easy-to-read reports, Emma actually makes it easy for you to pull out actionable data from the reports.

One pretty neat feature is the ability Emma has to put lightbox forms on your website (those forms that pop-up when you’re reading an article asking for your email). It’s one of the most effective ways of gathering emails. (We have one. Did you leave your email to get the awesome emails I will send you filled with great information on how to find the perfect email marketing system yet?)

Emma also has email automation and dynamic content abilities that are wonderful for beginning automators.

The Downsides: Those custom templates I mentioned above… well, they cost extra.

AWeber is an email solution for small business marketers who don’t have a lot of time to spend on their email marketing campaigns. Their pricing plans start at $19/mo for up to 500 contacts.

What Makes It Special: AWeber works really hard to live up to their claim of being the best solution for time-strapped email marketers, as I mentioned. One of the greatest ways they do this is by offering 700+ templates. This huge library of templates means you’re pretty unlikely to have to do much customization. Pretty awesome. Oh, also, they offer up to 4 split tests at one time! Major brownie points.

iContact is geared toward businesses with a smaller email database size, as evidenced by the fact that their most expensive plan is for up to 15,000 contacts. Plans start at $14/mo for 500 contacts. If you prepay annually, you will save 15%.

What Makes It Special: iContact differentiates itself as being easy-to-use for people who have no idea how to use email marketing. And they succeed. One feature I was really impressed with was the Message Coder tool. This tool allows you to customize your email templates without having to know HTML. While most email builders have a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editor, many of the other solutions on this list only allow you to customize the actual layout of the template with HTML. iContact also provides a large amount of easy to comprehend learning material, including full length articles and live/recorded webinars.

The Downsides: Despite their focus on ease of use, iContact’s interface is fairly clunky. It lacks the streamlined, modern feel that most other solutions have today. You can check out their website (or the above screenshot of their homepage) for a preview of the interface. It’s mostly an aesthetic problem, but ultimately, it depends on your preference as a user. I suggest you sign up for a free trial first to decide for yourself.

Mad Mimi is one of the most affordable email marketing solution available today. Their plans start at $10/month for 500 contacts. They also have a free plan that gives you storage for up to 100 subscribers. They’re even willing to customize a plan for you. For the full run down on their pricing plans, compare the various packages on Mad Mimi’s website.

What Makes It Special: I LOVE Mad Mimi. And they deserve my love for a couple of reasons.

They have insanely awesome customer service. I say this from personal experience. I chatted with all of the vendors on this list that offer an IM feature on their site. Only Mad Mimi’s representative (Brad, I think?) responded in a friendly manner. Further, he was the most helpful of all the representatives I chatted with. For this reason alone, Mad Mimi earned my eternal love.

Emails you send with Mad Mimi are 100% customizable, and it’s really easy to modify them. No HTML knowledge necessary. Just design away.

This solution is super simple, which makes it ideal for beginning email marketers. Create your emails and send them out.

The Downsides: For a start, Mad Mimi’s emails are 100% customizable because they don’t have any templates. But Brad assured me that this wasn’t an issue because you have access to a large gallery of stock photos, and the emails are really easy to build. The other big thing is that Mad Mimi has no ability to split test. Ouch.

SendInBlue has a super flexible pricing plan, as well. They have eight plans, including a free version that sends up to 9,000 emails a month, that run the gamut for any business size. Their first paid package is $7.37/month for 40,000 emails/month. None of their plans have a limit on contacts.

What Makes It Special: SendInBlue is a bit of a dark horse – it’s not a very well known solution, but everyone who uses it seems to love it. SendInBlue’s pricing, as I said, is really awesome, especially because they make it fairly customizable for your business size. Also, if you’re looking for an easy uploader, SendInBlue is your go-to solution. SendInBlue makes uploading contact lists super easy.

The Downsides: The biggest one I could find is that while SendInBlue does allow you to embed social media sharing buttons in your emails, they make it a little difficult. You have to put all the social media buttons they have in the template, regardless of whether or not you use that platform.

SimplyCast has a free plan for up to 2000 contacts and unlimited emails. The next plan up is just $10/month – making SimplyCast a really good solution for a small business.

What Makes It Special: SimplyCast has great reporting functionality. The reporting was built for someone who is not very familiar with email marketing, so it’s extremely easy to set up and understand.

The Downsides: The only big downside to SimplyCast is that the customer service can be iffy. If you have the free plan, you only have access to 30 days of customer service via phone. Other plans have unlimited access via phone, but only during business hours. If you send an email, they do try to get to you within 24 hours, though. The chat feature is rough, and can go for hours unanswered.

ActiveCampaign is a great option for any business size. They offer an extremely flexible pricing plan for any business, from small to enterprise. Prices start at just $9/mo for 500 contacts.

What Makes It Special:

ActiveCampaign’s email management abilities are all-around solid, from the split testing to the functionality to create special date-based campaigns. (You can send customer birthday emails, for instance!)

And as another plus, ActiveCampaign makes it seriously simple to upload contacts. In fact, they are the only solution I found that allows you to sync your contact info from a third party program, like your company’s CRM.

Freshmail is the perfect solution for experienced email marketers who are ready for a little bit of marketing automation action. Freshmail teeters on the edge of email marketing and marketing automation software, and ultimately, I’d place it as an extremely lightweight marketing automation solution. However, it’s on this list because it’s extraordinarily well-priced. At $14/mo for 1,000 subscribers it can easily compete price-wise with any of the other systems. Freshmail’s pricing scheme is very flexible and also features a pay-as-you go option, starting at $7 for 1,000 emails. Freshmail even has a freemium plan! For absolutely nothing, you get unlimited emails to 500 contacts! And Freshmail only gets sweeter as we dive into the details.

What makes it special: Reviewers love Freshmail for a number of reasons:

You can import contacts from any other service. .CSV, Gmail, your CRM. All of them.

Because it’s a lightweight marketing automation system, you can automate email tracks, and use dynamic content. Hot dog!

You can import your own templates to Freshmail, or export Freshmail templates to customize in whatever programs you choose to use.

Freshmail can create barcodes to send out in emails, making it perfect for retailers looking to send out discounts.

And they A/B test!

The Downsides:Overall, there is very little that reviewers complain about. The largest con is that Freshmail is not really a good system for first-time email marketers. All its features can make it difficult to navigate for someone who has never sent an email campaign.

Campayn is competitively priced, with their first paid plan coming in at $10/month for 1,000 subscribers. They have a pay-as-you-go plan that starts at $50 for 5,000 emails. Additionally, they have a freemium plan: 20,000 emails to 500 subscribers.

What makes it special: Campayn has the ability to embed sign-up forms for subscribers on your website, which makes it easy to collect emails from visitors. Reviews also mention that the service has a phenomenal customer service team who helped minimize issues that could have been potentially serious. An example mentioned was that the reviewer had trouble importing contacts, so the customer service agent actually took his list and did it for him!

The Downsides:

Obviously, as mentioned above, it does seem to be a bit tricky to import contacts, but the customer service team will solve that problem for you.

Campayn can get pricey. The plans I mentioned above are good for one user. To add multiple users to your plan, you actually have to separately purchase multi-user accounts. They start at $39/month for 15 people. (The good news about that is you’d have to be a very large business to need more than 15 users.) That means, a plan for 10,000 subscribers and three users (a very normal amount of subscribers/users) comes to a whopping $79/month.

Mailerlite is the cheapest solution on this list. When paid annually, you can send an unlimited amount of emails to 5,000 subscribers for $6.66! (When paid monthly, it’s $10.) Its free plan is also the most generous on this list, at unlimited emails to 1,000 subscribers.

What makes it special: Mailerlite is perfect for first time email marketers. As its name suggests, it’s extremely lightweight, with a focus on making it easy to create and send out an email. It has a drag-and-drop editor, with a built in photo editor. Mailerlite has A/B testing, basic autoresponse capabilities and the ability to embed sign-up forms on your website. Additionally, they have an iPad sign-up app, so that you can gather emails in person.

The downsides: As mentioned, Mailerlite is extremely lightweight. If Freshmail is for experienced marketers, Mailerlite is for first-time senders. Furthermore, there is a likelihood that as you get more experienced, Mailerlite will have difficulty keeping up with your abilities.

More?

So those are my suggestions for the top ten Mailchimp alternatives to consider for your small business. Do you use any of the above, or do you prefer the tried-and-true, Mailchimp? Or is there another email marketing solution I’ve missed here? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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About the Author

Cara Wood

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Cara Wood is a marketing associate at Capterra and a graduate of Mary Washington! When she's not hard at work at Capterra, she can be found horse-back riding, reading and just generally having a good time at life.

Comments

Comment by John on January 26, 2015 at 2:24 pm

Carla,

thanks for sharing the list of email marketing platforms, but beside of SendInBlue there aren’t anything new. I would recommend to review newer services like: http://freshmail.com/ or http://campayn.com/. It could be refreshing alternatives 🙂

Comment by Donia on January 27, 2015 at 12:21 pm

Thank you for this article, I wanted to find an alternative solution to mailchimp. I needed to send one email per month to c.4,000 customers, and mailchimp was too expensive for just that. I am going to try SendinBlue, it seems like their pricing is more flexible and adapted to my needs 😉

I started with Constant Contact then tried Mailchimp and Aweber not now I’m using Campayn and I truly LOVE it because it’s really simple and the emails look gorge! The prices are a little better too.

Comment by eduard dupal-ag on March 16, 2015 at 3:07 am

I have tried mailchimp but unable to send email successfully due to some violations of terms which I do not understand. Is there other MailChimp Alternatives that is free?
Thanks.

Comment by Grey Garner on March 27, 2015 at 1:02 pm

Thanks for including Emma in your analysis, Cara! This is a great resource and I’m sure it’s helping tons of folks find a service that’s right for them. I did want to point out a couple of things that might make your review of us a little more helpful to your readers. Along with those beautiful templates you mentioned (actually, over 200 of them), we do, in fact , have a pretty fantastic split testing feature we’re proud of, along with powerful Automation features for more personalized, realtime messaging, unlimited audience segments, fields and groups, and visual click maps for seeing how and when people interact with your email. Again, very much appreciate being included, hope this extra detail is helpful to your readers! Cheers, Grey

Comment by Cara Wood on March 27, 2015 at 1:04 pm

Thanks for including that note, Grey! I really appreciate it!

Comment by Karthik Chintala on May 14, 2015 at 9:23 am

Great post !

sendinblue gives awesome features to free users too. Cool

Comment by Dev Nair on May 29, 2015 at 7:48 am

Nice post . Great alternatives suggested!

Comment by Giovanni O on June 2, 2015 at 6:43 pm

I still wonder what’s the big deal behind all this that these guys generally charge outrageous amounts… Just imagine $10/month for 500 contacts…

Comment by Ilma Nausedaite on June 15, 2015 at 6:15 am

MailerLite offers free forever plan for up to 1000 subscribers. You can use all the features (including autoresponders) and send unlimited email to the readers. Check it out: https://www.mailerlite.com

Comment by Madhurima Saxena on July 1, 2015 at 8:30 am

Hello! Cara
I really want to thank you for this very informative blogs, I like to know about some more tools apart from mail chimp that was useful for email marketing.

Comment by Martina Heinzle on July 9, 2015 at 7:37 am

I just started using Send in Blue and am quite happy with it.
One thing I wanted to correct: It actually let you delete out social share buttons that you don’t want to have in your email. 🙂

Comment by Stanley on August 7, 2015 at 1:41 pm

Thanks for such useful list autoresponders. Well for small site owners like me, I suggests other you to go for Mailchimp or Sendin free plans. They are great and best options for newbies.

Comment by Ivan Horvat on September 30, 2015 at 6:50 pm

You can also try and Emailfy : emailfy.com

Prices are great and app is ok. It’s really easy for use, but have a lot of options. And app is cheap !

Comment by Home Decor on November 4, 2015 at 4:54 pm

Thank you for the list.
I signed up for mailchimp and sent a SINGLE email to test and immediately got blocked. Then they sent me an email saying plainly “We don’t want to work with you…go find another service!”
What a crappy company

Comment by Gael Baines on November 17, 2015 at 8:14 am

After reading this article on sat I signed up for Sendin blue it seemed so simple and easy unfortunately it won’t let me send a test email and after several attempts to get support I will need to consider other mail programs. Thanks for a really decent well written article.

Comment by Nath on November 19, 2015 at 11:01 am

Great article Cara 🙂

I’m using Sendinblue right now and I’m pretty happy with the features and their low prices. Plus it’s easy to use. So yeah it’s a great alternative to the chimp!

Comment by Terry Tosky on November 30, 2015 at 8:54 pm

I have just decided tonite that I am going to trash mailchimp. I have tried to get it to capture email addresses with an embedded form, and I haven’t been able to make it work the way I want to. I don’t see what is so hot about mailchimp. I’m thinking that they are making a big mistake by limiting their features and support for free customers. It seems to me that if they would provide email support for beginners and give them more attention, then those people would naturally become paying customers after their customer numbers increased. Mailchimp obviously doesn’t agree with this. Goodbye MailChimp ! ! !

Comment by P. Ridge on December 10, 2015 at 6:33 pm

I have read more than a couple of third party reviews of email marketing software. However, none of these reviews discuss delivery rates i.e. what % of emails actually are “delivered”? Are all software programs equal in this regard or are some better than others in ensuring your email is delivered.

Surely, this is the most important criteria. I would imagine far more important than having pretty pictures in your newsletter or how many templates there are in a particular email marketing program. Yet, no reviews ever touch on this important factor. Can anyone throw some light on this issue? As I am amazed that reviewers don’t comment on what is the most important criteria for users of email marketing software programs.

Thank you in advance.

Comment by Cara Wood on December 11, 2015 at 8:21 am

P. Ridge – No one really talks about this because it doesn’t have anything to do with the software. That is, the delivery rate depends upon the email servers of those you are emailing. All the software is capable of delivering 100% of your emails, provided the receivers have given you good emails, etc.

Comment by Ryan on December 14, 2015 at 10:07 am

Nice post! I love GetResponse!

Comment by Shatona Groves on January 7, 2016 at 11:48 pm

I thought the list was perfect! I didn’t know about many of the free options.

[…] one of the top email marketing services for low-cost, high-return campaigns. However, here are a host of other email marketing services to investigate. Emma, for example, is great for reaching a larger base of prospects, and Constant […]

Comment by Ryan ODonnell on January 20, 2016 at 4:41 pm

We’ve tried most of these but have been most satisfied with SendInBlue. Their system was incredibly easy to use and any questions have always been promptly responded to via email. I use them to send scheduled, weekly campaigns to targeted lists as well as isolated campaigns going out to tens of thousands of contacts. They’ve handled both scenarios beautifully and continue to be the company I recommend.

I’ve used Constant Contact, MailChimp, iContact and Emma FYI.

Hope this helps someone!

Comment by Panos Rozakis on January 26, 2016 at 10:02 am

Just registered with SendinBlue.

I imported 70 of my customers and prepared my first campaign. I spend like 6 hours setting up everything. When i pressed the send button I received this :

Unfortunately, after reviewing your account, we found that your operations/processes, content or database don’t comply with those of our target clients and our policies.
SendinBlue Customer Service

What a waist of time …

Comment by Ran on January 28, 2016 at 11:41 am

This is a nice post. I would mention also Activetrail

Comment by Kathy Sarns Irwin on January 31, 2016 at 8:32 pm

We switched to SendinBLue from MailChimp ( after many years) because our prices were increasing and Chimps site was getting too confusing. We have been SO happy with this switch! SendinBlue is VERY EASY to use (much more intuitive than Chimp) and thus I SAVE lots of time. I was able to call and be helped by a very nice (real) person when we were setting up too. SendinBlue prices are much more reasonable for our small company. And for some reason more of our emails are being opened now! Not sure if that has anything to do with SendinBlue but we sure are happy with our switch.

[…] to MailChimp, Emma is a less famous option (but one that is steadily growing). Though they do not currently offer a free plan option, they […]

Comment by E S on March 22, 2016 at 5:15 am

Hi.

I just come back to this excellent list to search for some alternative, after having many problems with SendInBlue.

This is our case:

Our website contains educational resources for teachers and families: no drugs, no sex, no free money or physical enhancements.

We have up to 200.000 subscribers in our website. All of them have accepted to receive the newsletter. More or less, 40% have Hotmail accounts.

We began to have “expired soft-bounce” for these Hotmail accounts. But the final disaster came with our last campaign. Even some customers who used to open and click have not received the newsletter.

I’m pretty sure that we made some mistake with our emails but, during this time, after asking many times for their help, the only advice from SendInBlue was: “You should send the newsletter to the accounts that are going to open it”.

Great! Why should anyone need an email marketing solution if this is the way to send a newsletter?

Every newsletter has different people opening it. The subject and text of a campaign vary from a campaign to another, and they will have interest for different user profiles.

What is the usual opening / clicking ratio of a normal campaign? With this advice, this ratio will quickly reach 100%.

My opinion on SendInBlue: Good product, bad support.

Comment by Cara Wood on March 22, 2016 at 9:15 am

Thanks for sharing!

Comment by Holly on March 28, 2016 at 4:25 pm

Great list thanks!

Comment by Abu Abid on March 30, 2016 at 7:52 am

Hello Cara,
Very brilliant insight you have given in this article, and its really helping us out while evaluating the systems as we are trying to choose one for our company. The Mailchimp is really nasty with its Omnivore system which they have employed as it causes accounts to be blocked with no reason. They say its there policy violation and their team interacts in a very unkind way , a bit too much arrogance. It would be great if you also mail us a good suggestion in email marketing. So far, during evaluation process, FirstMail has seemed good. Thanks once again for brilliant research, pros & cons listing for each system you did.

Comment by Peter on April 9, 2016 at 6:59 am

I need to say that you should never trust mailchimp. They also own mandrill.
We have optin member base which is return path verified (top level status) & this email deliver company have been fully pause our emails with little/no notice and disable links too.
They seriously don’t give a shit when they cause this damage – mind blowing they sell themselves as great partner for small/medium businesses – total vampires who provide 2 line replies then pause you.

Comment by Nico Hirtt on April 13, 2016 at 4:22 am

I do not recommend SendInBlue. They attract you with very low prices (5,4 euros for 40000 emails/month) but once you have created and payed your account, once you spent may hours preparing and importing your adresses, preparing and testing your first campaign, the suddenly announce that their system “has detected some problems with your adresses” and that you should buy a dedicated IP for… 120 euros/year. Despite many mail exchanges I never got an answer at the question : “what are those problems ?”, “how can I solve them”. Thus, the low price offer is just bullshit to get you start working with them.

Comment by Richard Lyon on April 13, 2016 at 4:46 pm

Hi Cara,

Love the article! Recently I did a job for a customer and had to use his mass mailing app called eflyermaker, and I gotta say it worked great. Integration was easy, I didn’t have to bother about CASL cause the template was already made compliant for me, and the pricing looked good. The tool was easy to use, no matter what your level of email knowledge is. From basic creation, to already customizable templates, to the drag n’drop tool and the easy integration, anybody can use it. Check it out! I really liked it!

Comment by Erwan Guivarch on April 25, 2016 at 12:17 pm

Hi Cara,

Thanks a lot for your list! This is very helpful 🙂 I also saw a full comparison (which is also up to date) of SendinBlue vs MailChimp when I visited their website: https://www.sendinblue.com/mailchimp

I hope this would help!

Comment by Lynn Fox on May 4, 2016 at 2:20 pm

Thank you for your article Cara. Great information. I’ve been using MailChimp and have recently started seeing warning messages like this:

“Deliverability warning
Subscribers with Gmail addresses might not receive MailChimp campaigns with a Gmail From email address. This is because several free email providers have changed their authentication policies. Yahoo and AOL already have these policies in place. Gmail, Hotmail, and others are set to implement them soon.

To avoid the risk of delivery issues, use a From email address at your own custom domain.”

I don’t have my own domain email so I must use a “gmail” address. Will I have the same problems regardless of the application I use or is there a service that can get around this issue?

Thank you,
Lynn

Comment by Julian on May 20, 2016 at 9:49 am

We have been using Mailchimp and Mandrill for long time, but I am very disgusting to see that Mandrill is now being part of Mailchimp forcing to have a subscription with them. I am exploring other alternatives such as Amazon SES to deliver emails from a WordPress blog using MyMail. So far, so good.

Comment by Marcus Fernandez on June 6, 2016 at 11:22 am

We’ve begun using EmailOctopus, which offers many of the features that these bigger competitors do. The main difference though is that delivery is done by Amazon SES, as opposed to the platform itself.

Our marketing costs were around about £1000 a month previously, that’s come down to around £90 a month after the switch and we’re maintaining conversion rates.

Comment by Senthil Ganapathi on June 22, 2016 at 2:55 pm

I created the account with Sendinblue on 19 June based on my research in this blog. Their monthly plan suited my requirement, so I uploaded all my contacts and then went to create the Campaign. I had a tough time creating compaign when compared to Mailchimp and Zoho. When I tried to send a test email, I got the message that the account needs to be validated and it will take 24 hours to get completed. I waited until today 22 June and then opened a ticket with them. Within 2 hours they replied mentioning that “your operations/processes don´t comply with those of our target clients and our policies.”

My effort of around 4 to 6 hours wasted with this company. I sent emails with mailchimp and zoho very easily, the only limitation is that their free plan limits 2000 contacts and I have 4000 contacts to email.

My advice based on my experience with their campaign designer and their service is stay away from them, there are plenty of service providers who are better than sendinblue.

Comment by Cara Wood on June 24, 2016 at 8:39 am

Senthil-

So sorry to hear that Sendinblue didn’t work out well at all! Thanks for sharing your experience here. I’m glad to know that MailChimp and Zoho work so well for you, though!

It appears that there is a coverage gap in this article – what about open source and free software such as phpList? Why no discussion on saving thousands per year when you install an open source solution?

Comment by Erin @ SendinBlue on August 4, 2016 at 8:50 pm

Hi Senthil,

Thank you for letting us know about your experience. I’m so sorry that the validation process caused frustration for you.

Our team talks with every new SendinBlue user to confirm that their contacts are 100% opt-in and have not been listed for previous sending issues. While this may seem like a process, it’s essential to protect our users and ensure they understand the applicable regulations around email and SMS communications. It’s also our way of ensuring SendinBlue users are setup to be as successful as possible in their marketing efforts, while also helping limit unwanted messages from being sent out from our service.

If you have any questions or concerns about the process, we’d be happy to talk with you. You can reach us at contact@sendinblue.com. Thanks!

Best,
Erin
The SendinBlue Team

Comment by Dan on August 12, 2016 at 7:18 am

Nice list! GetResponse also offers now marketing automation.

Comment by Laura Danner on September 27, 2016 at 8:51 am

I’ve been using Mailchimps free plan, but am not a load to try to send Affilate links, which I’d like to be able to do.

Comment by Selvine on October 3, 2016 at 11:16 am

a Big NO to sendinblue. The “free” is just to lure you. They will ask you to purchase dedicated IP package and list all issues with your subscriber.
I never have issue with my subscriber with others.

sendinblue response to your any technical question: “buy the package or leave”
Nope, not buying with that attitude

Comment by Erin on October 20, 2016 at 6:52 pm

Hi Selvine,

Thanks for taking time to share your experience.

I’m sorry to hear that you felt our position on opt-in contacts is unclear. Because this is such an important aspect of any successful email marketing strategy, we strive to be very transparent about about this requirement. Sending to opt-in contacts ensures that our users respect all applicable laws relating to email marketing, and limits unwanted messages sent from our system. It’s also our way of helping our users be as successful as possible in their marketing efforts, since messaging opt-in contacts also produces the best engagement.

To help make users aware of the opt-in contacts requirement, we include check-boxes that must be acknowledged by SendinBlue users when completing their account profile, and when uploading new contact lists to our platform. Contacts may not be imported to SendinBlue without first affirming that the contact list is opt-in. We also include information about this opt-in policy in our onboarding email series to new users, and on our website.

If you have any questions or concerns about our policies, please feel free to contact our customer care team and we would be glad to assist you. Our U.S.-based team is available by phone Monday-Friday from 8 am – 5 pm Pacific Time (1-844-744-2639), or you can reach our global team anytime by emailing contact@sendinblue.com.

Thanks again for taking time to give SendinBlue a try!

Kind regards,
The SendinBlue Team

Comment by Alexander V on October 26, 2016 at 5:36 pm

SendinBlue is a much better alternative than MailChimp. Thanks for sharing!

Comment by Phoebe Matthews on November 9, 2016 at 4:24 pm

I opened a free account with MailChimp and liked the ease of sending newsletters. Then I had more audience and needed to buy the 5000 list. Filled out all the forms. And the form stopped at PayPal and said they would connect me and nothing happened. I have written 4 times to MailChimp and so far have not received a reply. Their lack of direct customer contact is appalling.